Lecturer
Mario Angst
Past: 🌊,🌲,🌾,⚡,(🛢) governance
Now: 🏙️ and 🖥️+🍀
Computational Social Science (mostly network analysis, NLP, Bayesian modeling)
Biased toward strong sustainability, bikes and local solutions.
Day 1 - Learning goals
The students can differentiate between sustainability as a normative concept and socio-technical sustainability transformations.
The students are aware of the three core sustainability strategies
The students are able to access current sustainability science literature.
Day 1 - Program
- Introduction to the course
- Input sustainability
- Break
- Input digitalization
- Deep dive into sufficiency: Guest speaker Leonard Creutzburg
- Sustainability in research and teaching at UZH: Guest speaker Jeannette Behringer
Day 2 - Program
- Input sustainable digitalization
- How does my research relate?
- Build your own sus+digi project
Sustainability as a normative concept
Sustainability
We’ll count to two.
If you are one: Introduce yourself to your neighbour to the right. Discuss (in pairs) for 7 minutes:
What does sustainability mean to you?
Be prepared to introduce your neighbour and what sustainability means to them afterwards.
A key differentiation
- Sustainability as a normative concept, including its discoursive contestation and imaginaries
- Sustainability transformations as socio-technical change processes oriented toward sustainability
The Brundtland definition
Worth studying for a bit.
Take five minutes to read through this. This is the text ©️
Does anything surprise you? Discuss with your neighbor to the left (for ones) and be prepared to share your thoughts.
The Brundtland definition
intra- and intergenerational justice is front and center
but there were/ are many other sustainability definitions
Making sense of sustainability definitions
It all comes down to substitution of natural capital for future generations
🤯 Beware of “nature” 🍃
What about the three pillars?
We don’t talk about the three pillars
Three core strategies
So sustainability is an interconnected problem of distributive justice and resource use. Behold the three strategies everyone should be aware of in order to reduce resource use:
- efficiency
- sufficiency
- consistency
Strategy game
We’ll form four groups.
We will take ten minutes to gather as many examples of:
- behaviours
- policies
- business models
- research projects
you can associate with one of the four strategies.
Decoupling
… (economic) activity from resource use
- single decoupling: green growth narrative, often efficiency only
- double decoupling: efficiency + sufficiency
Sustainability imaginaries
Things become more sociological.
Futures of sustainability. “In a certain sense, a sustainable world is a fiction” (Martens 2006, 40):
- Modernization
- Transformation
- Control
Modernization
weak sustainability, “green growth”
![]()
https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/
Control
resilience, inevitability and emergency
powerful entities solve crises with emergency powers
![]()
https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/
What is your imaginary?
Take a walk with your neighbour to the right (for ones). Be back in twelve minutes. Prepare to share your thoughts with the group.
![]()
https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/
Modern sustainability science concepts
Planetary boundaries
![]()
Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Persson et al 2022 and Steffen et al 2015
Doughnut economics
![]()
https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/
The Anthropocene
… questions everything.
![]()
nature-culture dichotomies
is there an “environment”?
Leverage points
How to intervene in complex systems?
![]()
Fischer and Riechers, p. 117
